0:04Skip to 0 minutes and 4 secondsI'm Ewan Simpson. I'm the director of the Kazakh-British Competitiveness Centre in Kazakhstan. And we're with partner with Henley Business School. What we found in terms of technology-- being based in Kazakhstan, living and working there-- that increasingly partnership is very, very easy for the technology-based startups. Partly originally it was due to cost, because programming costs were so low, and IT is very, very strong in Kazakhstan, as it is in most of the post-Soviet space. But the value added in Kazakhstan has increased over time. So they're actually doing a lot of the design and development in Kazakhstan for apps which were being sold in California.

0:45Skip to 0 minutes and 45 secondsThey can very, very rapidly get access not only to European markets but also to the Russian language market, which many, many companies are excluded from simply because of language. They can also transfer technologies very, very quickly because they're working with people, as we are with people in Reading. So it's completely removed the barrier of distance. You think of Central Asia, you think it's in the middle of nowhere. But actually, we talk daily with our partners here, and many of the businesses we work with are doing exactly the same in Europe and the United States and China. So this course will be very, very relevant for them because everything's changing so fast. Everything is new.

1:25Skip to 1 minute and 25 secondsBut that gives them an advantage because they don't have the legacy infrastructure of traditional ways of doing business. Coming from a Soviet legacy, there's a huge space for startup companies who are innovative and understand how to use the technologies.

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